Zimerman is easing his 15-month-old son into the world of horror by hanging posters of “beginner monsters” like Godzilla and King Kong in his living room.

He has decorated his son’s bedroom with Universal Studios monster masks and other monstrous prints.

“He says good night to all of them before he goes to bed,” says Zimerman, a 39-year-old journalist specializing in horror, who is featured in a new documentary called Why Horror?, which airs on Super ­Channel on Oct. 28. “I don’t know if he’ll stick with it. A lot of kids like monsters and sort of grow out of it.

These are the folks whose front yards blossom with inflatable ­Halloween fiends, the folks who have made zombie gorefest The Walking Dead enormously popular, the ones who have plastered novelist Stephen King to the bestseller lists.

Experts say these legions of horror lovers share a shivery secret denied to those of us who have little ­stomach for things creepy. Monsters are our friends. They’re our teachers.

And they had better be — because monsters are us.

In the 1977 horror film The Hills Have Eyes, the heroes resist the savages so violently that the bad and good folks come to resemble each other.

A movie poster promoting Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace shows a young and cherubic Anakin Skywalker casting the shadow of Darth Vader, the monster that he will become in adulthood.

“All bad guys started out as little kids playing in the yard and go through certain experiences that make them what they are,” Zimerman says.

Karen Budra, an English and film instructor at Langara College, says there’s a shred of humanity in most monsters and a touch of the monster in all of us.

“You are just a tiny step from becoming the monster,” says Budra, who specializes in gothic and horror film and literature. “It is inherent in all of us. Monsters are a reflection of you.”

Horror gives people a chance to feel empathy for monsters without condoning their behaviour. Kids and adults dressing up as Halloween ghouls get a chance to see the world through a monster’s eyes, Zimerman says.

And those are often beguiling eyes. Modern fictional monsters have evolved beyond blood-and-gore goons to become urbane and attractive figures, Budra says.

“They’re more interesting and compelling than ordinary people,” she says. “Hannibal Lecter is an incredibly suave guy.”

Horror stories are actually courses in etiquette masquerading as gross-out slasher flicks, experts say. Stephen King pretends to be a master of psychological horror but he’s really an Emily Post who schools people in the rules of proper behaviour.

“Monsters show us the boundaries and lines of behaviour we should not cross,” Zimerman says.

The survivors in horror stories tend to be those who respect the rules, like the backpacker who knows how to speak a European language in the 2005 horror film Hostel, Budra says.

On the other hand, horror also flouts the rules of ­conventional ­reality and overturns arbitrary notions of order, Budra says. Inanimate objects are liberated to become as alive as people.

“Anything is possible,” she says. “Bad things are possible but there is something beyond what we see. Perhaps this in some way shows a desire for transcendence.”

One of the horror genre’s charms is that it offers safe fear, Budra says. People can dip their toes in terror in the protected environment of a movie or book, she says.

“In watching a film, you go into a large, dark room with other people and there’s almost a ritualistic worship of the monsters,” she says. “It’s viscerally thrilling and we also know that it’s going to end.”

But Zimerman says the fears we love to confront in the movies do not end at the multiplex. In some cases, people want those fears to follow them home, he says.

Zimerman doesn’t believe in spectres but if there’s a sudden noise in his house, his first thought is it’s a ghost.

“Our rational mind tells us not to believe, but something inside of many people wants to believe in an afterlife. There’s a spiritual kernel in people,” he says.

Until recently, Zimerman would have said he had become harder to scare at the movies, and less forgiving of attempts at onscreen horror. But since he got married, bought a house and had a child, he finds depictions of home invasions in movies unnerving.

And as a parent, it’s a struggle for him to see horror filmmakers break the taboo against hurting children on screen.

“It’s very hard for me to watch that,” he says.

Paul Budra, an English professor at Simon Fraser University and Karen’s husband, says horror stories in film or books give voice to the repressed fears of a particular era.

In Victorian England, women were beginning to seek equality with men and people spoke of sex more ­openly. Along came Bram Stoker’s ­novel Dracula, in which “demons turn virginal women into bloodsuckers,” he says.

Karen and Paul, who met when they were grad students studying 17th-century love poetry, don’t necessarily agree on what individual works of horror mean.

Karen believes zombies on the TV series The Walking Dead reflect people’s horror of voracious consumerism in the wake of the 2008 recession.

“Horror is a good barometer of social anxiety,” she says. “The zombie is the ultimate consumer.”

Paul, on the other hand, suggests the zombie swarms reflect people’s alarm at being buried by email and social media.

“It’s all these mindless things coming at us until we’re overwhelmed and torn apart,” he says.

“Humans have an instinctive fear of being eaten by predators,” he says. “A world overrun by rotting cannibals taps into that fear.”

Vancouver Paranormal Society president Peter Renn stops well short of saying people enjoy fear. The society sometimes gets calls from people to investigate occurrences that spook them to the point that they move out of their house.

In 20 years of paranormal investigations, Renn says he has occasionally been apprehensive, but not scared.

“It’s a matter of knowing that whatever is there will not harm you 99.9 per cent of the time,” he says.

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